UK ‘should use its territories to spy on China’s satellites’

BRITISH overseas territories should be used to counter the China space threat by monitoring the skies above them, a King’s professor has said.

Dr Mark Hilborne, a defence lecturer at King’s College London, said as a “small island” the UK needs to take advantage of its territories, such as the Falklands and Diego Garcia – an atoll just south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean – where it can plant sensors on the ground to keep an eye on adversaries’ satellites in space.

He told The Daily Telegraph: “It’s sort of theoretical footprint on the ground, and that will give you coverage of different areas, which the US has kind of gaps in the southern hemisphere so the UK could then fill in that gap in terms of getting an overall picture of what’s in space and who’s doing what.”

He added that it was “relatively cheap to put things on the ground and look upwards”, would be a cost-effective way to complement satellites in orbit and was justified “from a military perspective ... if China does things we need to know about it. The same with Russia”.